Cod Almighty | Diary

Never trust a man with egg on his face

30 August 2017

In general I find football fans' whole "our club is bigger than your club" shtick irrelevant as well as tedious. If your club wins a match or a trophy or gets promoted, and you feel you have to rub it in the faces of fans of clubs that didn't, well, that's one thing. It doesn't really interest me, but I get that it's a thing, and at least there's a sound basis for it. At least it's grounded in the actual and current matter of the game – the outcome of those 22 players huffing and puffing on the grass over there, today or this season.

It's another thing when you start goading another set of fans on the basis that there are fewer of them than of you, or your club used to be in a higher league than theirs, or your club has a larger stadium capacity than theirs. I don't give a stuff about any of that. If you need to resort to meta-football rather than actual football for your 'bragging rights', then you tend to look a bit desperate. And, you know, more of a loser than the people you're attempting to 'banter' with.

That said, your original/regular Diary is left wondering whether the reaction of some teams' fans to some events perhaps reflects a sort of inherent lesser status of their clubs.

As some have already pointed out, some Stevenage supporters have reacted in an extraordinary way to their club's outrageous recent assault against the human dignity of its visitors. No reasonable person could fail to share the unanimously appalled response of both Grimsby Town fans and the many thousands of neutrals who have read about #bragate in the media. Astonishingly, though, some Stevenage supporters have downplayed it, some have accused Town fans of overreacting, and some have even blamed the victims.

I don't know for certain, but I've got an inkling that this sort of response wouldn't have come from fans of proper, long-established Football League clubs.

Proper fans know where tribalism ends and decency and empathy take over. It's something cultural, something you absorb from years of immersion in the professional game, from rubbing shoulders with your counterparts at other clubs around the country who might sometimes number more than a few dozen. If something awful happens at a local derby against St Albans City, it might be the done thing to laugh it off or sweep it under the carpet. Well, not in the 92, it isn't. I'm afraid their response of stupefied denial to widespread media attention has made Stevenage look not only silly but distinctly small-time.

Lincoln City is a club I have time for. Pretty much all the insults hurled at them by Town fans are lame and self-defeating. Yes, in the past their football has often been as agricultural as the majority of their county, down there to the south of us. Yes, until last season their fans abandoned them in the Conference far more than we turned our backs on GTFC. But to begrudge a place back in the League to the club that is our proper historical rival – far more than Scunthorpe or Hull ever have been or ever will be – is churlish and daft.

Last night, though, the degree to which Imps fans embraced the bastardised Football League Trophy perhaps reflected a genuine difference between us and them.

Grimsby Town fans, to their immense credit, are right at the forefront of the #BTeamBoycott – to the extent of our supporters' team, magnificently, organising and playing a protest match last night against their counterparts at Doncaster Rovers. Only 500 or so home supporters were present for the official B team fixture. Lincoln, by contrast – and to their shame, in my view – took more than 800 on the road to their official B team fixture at Mansfield.

Perhaps this difference is because we're used to different things. As I say, I've no quarrel with Lincoln at all. But perhaps if their fans had grown up watching their first team compete against Leicester and Sunderland on an equal footing in the league – as we did ours – then they'd have had too much pride to buy in to a competition that institutionalises the abhorrent notion that the only value of lower-league clubs is in helping Premier League clubs.

I'm off for a sandwich anyway. What do you think of Jamille Matt?